Today was the last scheduled gathering of my class of first-years. There was some celebratory crepes involved and a lot of brochures for an Italian bicycle tour. That’s just how we party. It was the final for both the InDesign class and the macro-typography class which focused on using grid structures to create layouts. It was a bonding experience as we all tried to decode the instructions to convert our files into booklets– there’s a machine that prints and staples your booklet in one go. This machine is not perfect as people who reprinted or had to remove and replace staples will tell you, but still quite a lovely thing I would like to own. I would make booklets for everything.
Here’s a facing pages spread from my brochure. 
It was interesting designing this. I ended up doing a lot of the layout in the last week (after Jason taught us everything there is to know) and it went fairly smoothly. Character styles and paragraph styles aren’t the torture devices I thought them to be. They make things go a lot faster and keep everything consistent and organized. (Character styles and paragraph styles is a feature in InDesign where you can store settings for fonts and use them again in the same size and leading etc.)
Designing a whole book is tricky. Consistency and variation is not easy to achieve. I made a little photo collage map for each region and designed that page around the map. For the opposing side, I laid out the text then added photographs to fill some gaps and reinforce some groupings, conscious of keeping the text legible. Long wordy documents like this, I find it easier to tackle after reading it a few times and seeing things that can be put onto snipes, headlines and call outs to give the piece texture and readability.
(Earlier Post Relating to This Project)
